> (*) I have nothing against Flash as a technology: it has some merit... just
> > 99% of what people have done with it is a pointless waste of time, and > > simultaneously being bloody annoying cluttering up my browser. Thank god > > for Flashblock (because, like, God did that). > > > > > > > My problem with this is the assumption that Flash enabled bad crap. People > build plenty of bad things in plain ole HTML. Flash could go away 100% > My problem with what *you* say, Ray, is your assumptions about my motivations for saying what I did, and then continuing from there to make assumptions about what conclusions I draw from this. Which is a bit - uncharacteristically - rubbish of you. Especially as the conclusions you drew for me were pretty facile. You're stating the bleeding obvious to suggest that anyone is capable of producing crap via any mechanism, and Flash is no exception here. That said, I think Flash was/is far more an enabler of crap than raw HTML is. This is perhaps borne-out as not simply being a vagary of my thoughts on the matter, but the almost ubiquity of people thinking what's produced in Flash is *shit*, and the variety of options available to get rid of it from out screens. Another consideration here is that even with all Flash blocked, I can readily use almost all websites, so this pretty much demonstrates what people are doing with Flash is not actually... well... useful. It's fluff around the edges. People do crap with HTML and JS as well, and I guess this will be on the rise with the increased capabilities of both technologies (and browsers running them). However I've never heard of there being a market for a mark-up blocker like there is for Flash. It's the fault of the people producing the content rather than Flash itself, sure. I suspect this is because Flash came up in the "designer" community, and.. err... people doing design don't usually have much of a clue about UX (obviously there are exceptions, but they are *exceptions*), and accordingly we just get the designer's "creativity" declaring its presence unnecessarily on the screen, and at odds with what the user actually wants to achieve on the web page / site. Or just animated bloody adverts distracting from the actual purpose and intended experience of the page the ad is on. I think this describes about 95% of Flash that I have seen. Fortunately a lot of people seem to be understanding UX a bit better these days, so I think once Flash goes the way of the dodo, the experience it gave us will probably largely disappear too. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Flex had potential to "fix" the problems Flash designers had brought to the technology, but it never took off for what I see as being a few reasons: 1) Macromedia screwed it almost entirely with the pricing of v1.0. By the time v2.0 came out, most of the damage to its perception was done; 2) One of the versions wasn't terribly backwards compat. I think it was v2.0? Not so much from a library / language / syntax POV, but from the POV of how things were supposed to be done; 3) it was too much of a developer conceit... it perhaps went too far away from the original Flash being firmly in the designer space, to Flex being too much in the developer space. Accordingly most of the Flex "solutions" I saw looked very "default", because the developer was always more interested in the code than the design; 4) The standard UI implementation was too different from Windows (and I presume Mac), so whilst one could make a shiny-looking Flex form, most of the Windows short-cuts and "behaviours" didn't work (a good example of this is the old Flex UI for the CF bug tracker). This just makes them annoying to use. 5) I think the addition of needing to support Flex caused the Flash Player's rot to set in, with bloat and bugs all over the place. This could be coincidental timing though, and this is just my gut feel. I think Flex had a chance to make Flash useful, but it just didn't pan out. I think it also filled a client-side niche back in the days before very powerful and well-thought-out JS frameworks, however they're here now, so makes Flex a helluva lot less relevant than it could have been (but never really was). There. That's perhaps better than letting you articulate my position the basis thereof, yes? Cheers. -- Adam ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:355109 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
